Given Qatar’s hostility towards trade unions, this deal, which will see BWI involved in inspections and monitoring, as well as sharing its considerable knowledge of good health & safety practice, carries a significance that goes beyond the 30,000 workers expected to be involved in building Qatar’s stadia and could eventually help the hundreds of thousands working on related projects.

Although the Supreme Committee has generally been much more progressive than the rest of the country’s government, which continues to deny workers basic human rights, it has failed so far to effectively implement the “Workers Welfare Standards” (WWS) that it drew up to supposedly guarantee conditions on its projects. This deal with the BWI will be a chance to turn that around. If it does, the gap in treatment between those working inside each stadium and those working right outside it will become even more obvious and – hopefully – provide further impetus for wide reaching reform.

Perhaps most significantly, BWI will “review and assess” the worker welfare committees set up under the WWS in order to provide an opportunity to raise and resolve grievances in the absence of decent legal alternatives in Qatar. This would be the first time workers have had a chance to speak openly to a union organisation in Qatar.

It’s very early days, and there’s a lot of work to be done, but this is certainly the best news we’ve had so far on the campaign.

Amnesty International has poured cold water on Qatar’s claims to be protecting workers on FIFA World Cup projects, exposing a litany of abuses faced by people refitting the Khalifa International Stadium in Doha. As Amnesty put it: “For players and fans, a World Cup stadium is a place of dreams. For some of the workers who spoke to us, it can feel like a living nightmare.”

Furthermore, the report shows the unreasonable distinction Qatar is making between World Cup and “non-World Cup” projects.

The report, which looked at the experiences of two groups of workers over the course of the last year, finds that despite claims that World Cup workers were benefiting from special protection, the usual problems of squalid accommodation, passport confiscation, illegal recruitment fees and deceptive payment practices affected them whether working inside or outside a stadium construction site.

It also cites several examples of employers continuing to ruthlessly exploit the country’s restrictive kafala laws to trap workers in the country, including seven men working on the Khalifa Stadium denied the right to return to help their families in the aftermath of the April 2015 earthquake in Nepal. This exploitation is being used to force workers to accept whatever other abuse is thrown at them. One worker told the researchers he’d bravely asked to go home because he hadn’t been paid. “The manager screamed at me saying ‘keep working or you will never leave!’”

Amnesty’s report points out that any company who uses this power to deny freedom of movement, for whatever reason, is denying a worker their human rights, even if it accords with local laws.

Qatar’s Supreme Committee for Delivery & Legacy, charged with the delivery of the World Cup, launched its Workers Welfare Standard to, essentially, protect workers from the inadequacy of the country’s own laws, but the same failures of enforcement are making the initiative ineffective as anything more than a PR exercise. For example, as the report says, “all of the accommodation of workers who had worked on the Khalifa Stadium … that was inspected by Amnesty International in 2015 was in clear breach of the Workers’ Welfare Standards.” Despite this the Supreme Committee admits that “no World Cup contractor has been penalised for breaching the Welfare Standards.”

Failures by both the government of Qatar and the Supreme Committee to police their own standards and laws are compounded by the continuing restrictions on non-Qatari workers forming and joining trade unions. Qatar is essentially wedded to a top-down inspection system, excluding the voice of workers on the ground, while refusing to resource it with enough money, staff or political will to succeed.

Of course, many of the problems faced by these workers are illegal in Qatar, but the authorities remain “apathetic” in the face of the problem. Qatar repeatedly promises new laws to fix problems highlighted by its critics, but still hasn’t even managed to stop employers confiscating workers’ passports, something that has been illegal for years. In terms of kafala, the law needs to be completely abolished, not amended, so that employers have no power over their workers’ movements. Qatar has refused to consider this.

These proposed new laws have been Qatar’s key defence as it faces off against the International Labour Organisation (ILO), which visited the country earlier this year and also found workers stranded in the country, sometimes unpaid for months, as well as more evidence of passport confiscation and terrible living conditions. The ILO has given Qatar 12 months to meet demands for meaningful reform and proper enforcement. The ILO, a UN agency made up of governments, employers and worker representatives, sets international labour standards to which Qatar – as an ILO member – should conform, but of which the retention of kafala in particular puts it in breach.

“Workers covered by the Welfare Charter can exchange a friendly wave with those who are not”

Even if the Welfare Standards were to be better enforced, one of the other key findings of the report is the fine line between what counts as an official World Cup project (covered by the Standards) and what does not. One of Amnesty’s two groups of workers were preparing not the Khalifa Stadium, but the landscaped area right outside it, ludicrously denied official status. Qatar has been arguing about what constitutes World Cup construction with a pedant’s zeal for months, but it seems even the grounds surrounding an official venue are just too far away from the action for them, meaning that workers covered by the Welfare Charter can exchange a friendly wave with those who are not as they all prepare the country to host the competition. It also means that Qatar’s strident claims that no one has been killed on an official project needs to be taken with a pinch of salt.

FIFA comes in for particular criticism for what the report describes as a total failure of due diligence – their responsibility to take steps to prevent abuse in the supply chain for their tournament. “FIFA’s continued failure to take any meaningful action on the issue of labour exploitation means that thousands of migrant workers involved in World Cup construction sites are at risk of exploitation,” says Amnesty, also calling on FIFA to start using its power to compel Qatar to remove employers’ control over workers’ moments to avoid the whole World Cup, and not just the construction, being riddled with human rights abuse.

FIFA has, as you might expect, rejected much of this criticism, claiming it “has been integrating human rights components in different aspects of its work, processes and activities for many years,” and conveniently ignoring the fact that whatever they were doing had demonstrably had very little impact on the experience of Qatar’s migrant workforce.

The report also demands that all companies working in Qatar, which includes some British companies, should follow a code of best practice rather than simply following Qatari law, including promising not to use kafala against their workers.

We’ll get this up on its own page eventually, but here’s the ITUC’s excellent interactive film archive of recent Qatar investigations, Qatar Exposed.

With Qatar restricting access to the country’s construction workforce and the labour camps they live in, it’s been difficult to learn about the conditions in the country. With the help of brave locals, the ITUC have managed to put together a series of short films showing what it’s really like to be a worker trapped by Qatar’s oppressive kafala work-sponsorship system. Tales of injury, poverty and tragic death show the terrible flipside of Qatar’s glitzy World Cup dream.

Rather than giving us one long film, Qatar Exposed is a collection of short pieces and interviews that you can navigate round in any order you want. There are over 20 stories, allowing you to appreciate not only the horror and sadness of some people’s experiences, but also the awful fact that these are fare from isolated cases.

Abdes Ouaddou, the Moroccan footballer who found himself a victim of kafala when his Qatari club stopped paying him and refused to let him leave the country when he protested, has been a tireless campaigner against the system ever since. For all his own problems, it is the fate of those workers still in Qatar that concerns him, from construction workers preparing the country to host the 2022 World Cup, to the exploited aircrew of Qatar Airways.

Abdes has set up a SumofUs petition to ask Barcelona to end its deal with the state owned Qatar Airways unless they improve their treatment of workers.

As Abdes himself says:

“Eventually I was able to leave Qatar, but the migrant women who work for Qatar Airways don’t have that same luck.

The women who work for Qatar Airways face an extremely grim reality: cabin crew are being exploited, imprisoned without charge, forcibly confined on company premises and automatically sacked if they become pregnant. These abuses are an everyday event not only in Qatar Airlines but in the Qatari national employment system.

Right now, Qatar Airways sponsors one of the most famous football clubs, the Barcelona Football Club. Barcelona’s millions of fans see the team as “more than a club”, revered not only for the quality of its players — like Neymar, Andrés Iniesta and of course, Lionel Messi — but for its allegiance to ethics, fairness and social justice. That’s why we’re asking the world’s most respected football club to cut ties with the airline until workers conditions improve.

Qatar’s national employment system, kafala, is cruel and brutal. Employers are allowed to prevent workers from leaving the country, even if they mistreat workers. The Qatar Airways CEO even said so himself, he “doesn’t give a damn” about workers rights.

My message to the sporting world, Barcelona and FIFA: we cannot legitimize a company that exploits thousands of vulnerable workers. It is against the values of the sport. We need to drop Qatar Airways as a sponsor.”

Our friends at the FSF have now publicly joined the campaign, and hosted this blog on their site.

Qatar 2022 has sparked a building frenzy in the world’s richest country with an estimated 1,100 workers dying during construction. Stephen Russell from the TUC’s Playfair Qatar explains what fans can do to make their concerns known about that and the country’s “kafala” system… – READ MORE